Served as a senior strategic advisor to then-Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown from 1989-92

Was chief of staff at the U.S. Commerce Department during the first term of the Bill Clinton administration

Founded Democracy Alliance

Born in 1944, Rob Stein was a practicing attorney from 1968 until 1978, at which time he left the legal profession to spend the ensuing decade working for an array of nonprofit organizations, including the group Clergy and Laity Concerned. Thereafter, Stein served as a senior strategic advisor to Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown from 1989-92; chief of staff at the Clinton-Gore Transition Team's Washington office in 1992-93; and chief of staff at the U.S. Commerce Department from 1993-95. Next came a six-year stint (1996-2002) as a private equity investor.

At that point, Stein's political passions took him in a wholly different direction. One morning shortly after the 2002 mid-term elections, Stein recalls, he awakened to the realization that he was now “living in a one-party country”—a reference to the fact that Republicans were in control of the White House and both Houses of Congress. Deeply frustrated by that state of affairs, he resolved to study the history and tactics of the conservative movement in order to determine why it was winning the political battle.

After a year of analysis, Stein laid out his findings in a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation titled “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix.” Using graphs, charts, diagrams, and bullet points, he mapped out, in painstaking detail, how conservatives had pieced together a well-organized infrastructure of legal, political, and scholarly organizations dedicated to shaping public opinion on a variety of important social and political issues. Moreover, Stein claimed that a few well-connected, wealthy clans—including the Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and Coors families—had provided funding for those groups on a scale that had no equal on the political Left.

Stein's objective was to lay out a roadmap by which the progressive movement could duplicate the conservatives' path to success—i.e., create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups dedicated to battling conservatives. The key to this plan, as Stein envisioned it, would be the formation of a coalition of wealthy leftists and liberals willing to invest their money in such a cause.

In 2006 Stein co-founded the Committee on States, a collection of wealthy donors, political operatives, labor unions, and progressive organizations that have spent scores of millions of dollars promoting the election of Democratic politicians and the passage of progressive policies at the state level.

In 2010 Stein sat on the national advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank that aims to “carr[y] forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt” by “developing progressive ideas” such as a “more equitable distribution of wealth.”

Stein was a strong supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. During Obama's first term in office, Stein visited the White House on three separate occasions.

Stein views projects like the Democracy Alliance and the Committee on States, first and foremost, as vehicles for the accretion of political power, as he candidly explained on one occasion: “The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power. One president in this country, when he or she takes office, appoints … 5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors—a workforce of 12 million people—that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.... So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing … and the way we get progressive change, is to control government. That’s what this is about.”